WAYS TO ENHANCE THE CREATIVITY COMPETENCE OF PROSPECTIVE TEACHERS

The development of prospective teachers’ creativity competence is increasingly important for designing inclusive, responsive, and intellectually demanding learning experiences. However, creativity in teacher education is often reduced to novel teaching techniques rather than treated as a professionally grounded capacity to generate, select, implement, and evaluate pedagogical alternatives. This conceptual article examines how creativity competence can be enhanced through a theory-informed combination of pedagogical knowledge, divergent and convergent thinking, learner-centered motivation, reflective practice, and context-sensitive use of digital tools. The study employs a narrative, conceptually guided synthesis of established scholarship on creativity, teacher knowledge, self-regulation, feedback, and learning environments. On this basis, it proposes a six-stage CREATE cycle and an aligned formative assessment matrix for teacher-education courses. The framework emphasizes that instructional ideas must be both original and pedagogically appropriate, and that adaptation to learner needs is as consequential as idea generation. An illustrative microteaching scenario shows how the cycle may be implemented without presenting simulated outcomes as empirical evidence. The article concludes by identifying conditions for institutional adoption and testable directions for future research, including rubric validation and comparative evaluations of teacher candidates’ lesson-design performance.